AMD Athlon II X3 425 On Linux

Back in late 2007 / early 2008 when AMD's Phenom quad-core processors first came about there were Linux issues as we had noted, but now that those initial problems have been ironed out, we really have not encountered any major issues with recent AMD processors. The AMD Athlon II X3 425 had no problems running with Ubuntu 9.10 and Ubuntu 10.04 LTS nor did the AM3 motherboard that we used during our testing with its 890GX + SB750 Chipset.

This test system consisted of an MSI 890GXM-G65 motherboard (review coming soon), 4GB of OCZ DDR3 Black Edition memory, a 250GB Seagate ST3250310AS Serial ATA hard drive, and integrated ATI Radeon HD 4290 graphics. Our benchmarking was done with an Ubuntu 10.04 development snapshot using the Linux 2.6.32 kernel, GNOME 2.30.0, X.Org Server 1.7.6, fglrx 8.72.11 / Catalyst 10.4, GCC 4.4.3, and the EXT4 file-system.

When overclocking the Athlon II X3 425 we were able to push this CPU from 2.7GHz to 3.4GHz with ease. It took only a few minutes to get this tri-core AMD CPU running at 3.4GHz stable, while we could hit 3.5GHz with minor instability issues, but we could not push the CPU any further than that. In our benchmarks we ran the Athlon II X3 425 at 2.7GHz and 3.4GHz and compared its performance to the Phenom II X3 710 clocked at its default 2.6GHz frequency and then against an original AMD Phenom 9500 quad-core clocked at 2.2GHz. Due to incompatibility with the AM3 890GX motherboard, the Phenom 9500 was tested with an ECS A790GXM-A motherboard.

Benchmarks we ran through the Phoronix Test Suite included Apache, 7-Zip, Parallel BZIP2, LAME MP3, FFmpeg, x264, Gcrypt, OpenSSL, C-Ray, GraphicsMagick, Bullet Physics Engine, Himeno, John The Ripper, and Nero2D. Our graphics tests are coming in an article next week, as we look closer at the performance of the new ATI Radeon HD 4290 IGP.